This is my personal blog. I was Branch Secretary of Lambeth UNISON from 1992 to 2017 and a member of the National Executive Council (NEC) of UNISON, the public service union (www.unison.org.uk) from 2003 to 2017.
I am Chair of Brighton Pavilion Constituency Labour Party and of the Sussex Labour Representation Committee (LRC).
Neither the Labour Party nor UNISON is responsible for the contents of this personal blog. (Nor is my employer!)

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Friday, December 30, 2016

In the early
twentieth century, British
politics grew up from being a battle between “liberal” and “conservative”
wings of the ruling class and became, by the mid-twentieth century about the
conflict between representatives of the working class and of the ruling class.

As we were
defeated domestically so the (terribly flawed and often horrendous, yet real) global alternative to
capitalism was destroyed by the failure of its bureaucrat leaders to
foresee that they could never win a global arms race with rapacious global capitalism.

The “fall of
the wall” began (or accelerated?) a process of decomposition of social democratic
parties (in Europe at least) which has been perhaps most pronounced in Greece but
has been universal.
Much of the political left deluded ourselves from time to time that this was a
positive development. Some still do.

Right wing
social democracy sought salvation in the Blairite “Third Way” and an ultimately
doomed marriage between social and economic liberalism, a dream that could only
be sustained for a while – whilst the economy permitted the ruling class to
afford it.

The economic
crisis which made the “Third Way” unaffordable led to Conservative
Government in the United Kingdom (as it has eclipsed social democracy through
most of Europe) and the reaction to the revealed irrelevance of the flaccid
careerists who had dominated the Blair/Brown Labour Party has led to the
leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

However, I
understand and appreciate that just at the same time that a socialist has risen
(for the first time) to lead the Labour Party, so the class struggle has been
eclipsed as the organising principle of British politics because of defeats
previously inflicted upon our movement. The tragedy of the 2015 General
Election was not simply the first Tory majority in 23 years but that the
decision to call a referendum on the EU would reorganise our national politics around
an internal disagreement within the ruling class.

This has now
happened. The key political question in the UK is not currently whether you are
for the working class or the ruling class. It is whether you are for the
xenophobes and isolationists or the “globalising” exploiters. (For the
avoidance of doubt, your blogger takes the latter side as should all
internationalists and socialists).

Obviously
the task of socialists is to (re)build the working class movement (in part in
the hope that we can develop our national polity in the direction of class
politics once more). Any socialist outside the Labour Party is merely a
political tourist now – and within the Labour Party we must of course support
the socialist Leader of the Party.

However, we
cannot possibly offer uncritical support to a leadership which is plainly
unable to fathom the depths into which the national polity is sinking. To
suggest that Labour
can make “Brexit” work for working people is a lie that should not be told.

The sad but
simple truth is that we cannot prevent the marginalisation of Labour whilst our
politics is fundamentally defined by a dichotomy which is not class struggle
(any more than the working class in the occupied six counties have been able to
build a working class party under the shadow of a polity dominated by the
national struggle).

This is most
certainly not a failure of “Corbynism” (if such a thing exists) and the
solution is not a triumph of the residual Blairite careerists who form the
majority of the terminally unimpressive Parliamentary Labour Party (or of the
elements of the trade union bureaucracy who support them).

However, neither
the ragged remnants of right-wing social democracy flying the flag for “Progress”
nor the rag, tag and bobtail upon whom the current Party leadership are forced
to rely appear yet to have faced the reality of the change wrought upon our
national polity and the consequences of that change.

This would
be the point in such a blog post at which the reader might expect a (more or
less) trite answer to the problems previously identified.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Continuing the
theme of sharing with you, poor reader, the meanderings of my muddled mind
arising from three days in the recent hearing before the Assistant
Certification Officer (without touching upon the matters in the case itself) I
have been asking myself about the proper relationship between a trade union and
its employees.

Clearly large
trade unions need to employ staff to carry out various functions that it would
be impractical for members to carry out for ourselves. It is to be hoped that
many of those we employ will be committed to the principles of trade unionism
and UNISON has inherited a tradition that employees of the union may remain, or
become, members of the union which employs them.

In UNISON our Rule
Book says that staff can be members of our trade union, at Rule C.2.9, but
that they shall not be members “of any
branch or of any Group or of any Region” (Rule C.2.9.2.2).

That is a rule
which, to the casual observer, might be said to be honoured in the breach –
since there is a “National
Staff Branch” of UNISON which, even if it exists only for the convenience
of administration of membership, does nevertheless exist in breach of UNISON
Rules.

Rule C.2.9
precludes members who are employees from voting for membership of any lay body
(such as the National Executive Council) whereas it explicitly provides (at
Rule C.2.9.3) for a right to vote in a political fund ballot. Interestingly the
rule is silent on whether members in accordance with Rule C.2.9 have the right
to vote in elections for General Secretary, although the convention appears to be
that they are given that right.

UNISON members
reflecting upon what (little) we have achieved since 1993 need to be prepared
to rethink our trade union from first principles and therefore, in the first
place, we need to debate whether or not it is appropriate that staff employed by
a democratic lay-led workers' organisation should themselves be members of that
organisation.

On the
assumption that the status quo expressed by Rule C.2.9 survives critical
examination of its merits, we then need to think about whether or not the
election of a General Secretary is, like the election of our National Executive
Council, something from which those members who are UNISON employees should be
excluded in future – or whether it is, like a political fund ballot, a part of
our trade union democracy in which our employees should be included.

I incline
towards the former point of view, but I certainly think that it is unacceptable
that our Rule Book is silent on the question of whether or not staff, who are
UNISON members, should have a vote in the election of their own boss.

I don’t intend to go into the evidence which was heard this
week, or the arguments which will be put next year. The time for that will be
once the Assistant Certification Officer has issued her decision.

One question which popped into my mind this week was
whether we really need to have a General Secretary at all. Our Rule Book
(Rule E.3) says that we must – but the law only says that if you have a general
secretary they
have to be elected by the membership (unless they hold office for less than
thirteen months).

Branch-level elected positions in the trade union can be
job-shared in accordance with Rule G.4.1.5 but our Rules say we must have one –
and only one – General Secretary. This certainly entrenches hierarchy at the
top of our organisation and I cannot see why it should be essential for a trade
union governed by an elected lay Executive to have such a hierarchy of paid
staff.

In principle there is no reason why we could not have a
senior official responsible for (say) publicity, responsible to a lay
communications committee, a senior official responsible for organising,
responsible to a lay organising committee and so on. Unity and coordination
could be provided by the elected lay National Executive Council (NEC), rather
than by a secretariat of paid employees.

Certainly it is the existence of this secretariat which
raises the question of how to design, improve and strengthen democratic checks
and balances (which are at present seriously inadequate). In the early years of
UNISON the Presidential Team (a phrase which does not in fact appear in the
Rule Book) was developed by lay members of the National Executive in order to
provide lay oversight and scrutiny of senior officials, but in my time on the
NEC I have rarely noticed it performing this function.

Realistically I suppose it is this latter question (how to
improve democratic safeguards and lay scrutiny) we need to think about, but in
doing so, it is at least worth bearing in mind that we don’t necessarily have
to have a General Secretary, and that if we are going to keep the role in
future we should be certain that the position adds value and effectiveness to
our organising.

Before starting
work in local government thirty years ago, I knew that in successive struggles
in the twentieth century socialists in English local government had fought to
defend a model of autonomous, redistributive and adequately resourced municipal
government.

In Poplar
in the 1920s and Clay
Cross in the 1970s, Labour Councillors defied unjust laws rather than
abandon the interests of their working class electorate – and in the 1980s
Thatcher fought the “enemy within” in local government with quite as much
determination as she fought the trade unions.

At the time
what was significant about the defeat
of the poll tax was the end of Thatcher – but a generation on we can also
see that the replacement Council Tax has helped to facilitate the continuing
decline of the autonomy and legitimacy of local government.

The largest
collective bargaining unit in the economy is the local government workforce in
England, Wales and Northern Ireland (since Scotland broke away). This enormous
chunk of the trade unionised working class is organised largely in the three
largest trade unions – who between themselves have half the membership of the
TUC.

Yet neither
our trade unions nor our trade union movement as a whole have prioritised the defence
of local government over the past generation. This failure has reached its
culmination in the period since 2010. During the Coalition Government, local
Councils shed a fifth of their workforce, and the remaining four fifths lost a
fifth of their real income.

So, perhaps
if we want better to comprehend the “strange death of municipal England” we
need also to consider the state of local government trade unionism.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

I have kept
to the promise
I made not to provide a running commentary on preparations for next week’s
hearing in front of the (Assistant) Certification Officer of complaints made in
connection with the election for UNISON General Secretary last year. Being in
possession of some three thousand pages of documents and statements in a total
(now) of ten large files, I shall of course have a fair bit more to say soon –
and not all of it as a
pantomime.

I have
certainly learnt things from the preparation of this hearing which I would not
have learnt had I relied upon being given straightforward answers to questions
as a mere member of the ruling body of the trade union. Whatever the outcome of
the hearing, we must and will ensure that UNISON members have the opportunity
to become familiar with every detail of what went on in the course of the
election, so that members can make our own judgement about our own trade union.

What I see
now is what I have known for years, with greater understanding as each of the
thirteen years I have already served on the National Executive Council (NEC) of
UNISON has passed – UNISON is a top-down, hierarchical and bureaucratic organisation
directed by a small number of senior officials in conjunction with a few
leading members of the Executive (though the role of the lay part of this
partnership is strictly subaltern).

There are some on the left who might,
historically, have said “so what?” to this observation and, whilst I am
something of a troublesome ultra-democrat (with incipient anarcho-syndicalist
tendencies), I could see the argument that we ought not to trouble ourselves
too much if our trade union was less democratic than we might wish if it were
delivering for our members.

However.

The history
of the period since 2010 in particular is a history of UNISON “battening down
the hatches” in order to try to ride out a storm which shows no sign of abating.
In the service of this strategy we abandoned prematurely
the fight to defend public service pensions in 2012 and subsequently failed
time and againto
smash the pay
freeze which has driven
down the living standards of those of our members whose jobs we have been
able to defend.

Therefore,
in order to protect the continued existence of our trade union as an
institution, we have deliberately refrained from supporting assertively the
interests of our members. Our members have responded to this strategy as one
might expect, with declining participation and interest in our union, as it
delivers less for them.

From within
the organisation this truth cannot be acknowledged, as a culture in which
criticism is seen as disloyalty has risen over the years. Each success is
applauded. Each failure
is ignored. Critics are condemned or humiliated.

The combination
of undemocratic, “top down” bureaucratic control with ineffective performance
in collective bargaining is toxic for the future of UNISON. Ultimately, the
most energetic commitment to organising cannot keep such an organisation
growing in such a cold climate.

Therefore we
need change.

Members need
the new UNISONAction
Broad Left – and activists need to show discipline and humility to build
the coalition which is emerging to change our trade union.

We need
candidates in every seat in the forthcoming elections to our National Executive
Council (NEC) who are committed to change – and we need one such candidate for
each seat.

I will miss
the opportunity of being part of a larger left on the NEC, seriously trying to
reverse the decline of UNISON – but I will miss it far less if the seat I
currently occupy is filled by Sean Fox, Secretary of the Haringey branch and
representative of London on the National Joint Council Committee, who has the
experience and judgement to do the job we need to be done.

Monday, December 05, 2016

The small crowd outside the Supreme Court this lunchtime included a small number of knuckle-dragging fascists, some adherents of the little-known school of thought which holds that Boris Johnson was sent to us by Christ (one of whom was dressed, inexplicably, as a leprechaun) and a range of other oddities (including a disgruntled former taxi driver from Crawley).

The only organised left-wing group was the Movement for Justice, who have correctly identified that "Brexit" is racist and should be opposed. For the first time in my life I held a placard from the MfJ - because they were the only people there defending the values of socialism and democracy.

Are the left content to allow the far right to hold the space outside the Supreme Court - or will other socialists be there later this week?